Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PEA (The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28
Ancient Greeks used one word, techne, to designate both technology and art. It is only in modern times that art gained autonomy, becoming the object of one philosophical discipline: aesthetics. However, the emergence of mass media, and then of digital media, has brought art back to technology, challenging its autonomy. In this situation, some basic philosophical questions about art regain centrality: Why art? What is art for? What is the role of art in a technological society like ours? The traditional answer stresses the uniqueness of art, pointing to the essential difference between artworks and technical artifacts. The increasing interchange between art and technology, however, encourages us to question this statement, pursuing an alternative strategy. The hypothesis is that artworks belong to a technical kind which has been overlooked so far: the kind of experiential artifacts whose function consists in triggering experiences. Art is severed from technology only if one focuses on artifacts such as hammers or engines whose function consists in producing concrete effects. Yet, once experiential artifacts have been recognized, one can fruitfully trace art back to technology, rethinking forms of art as techniques for generating different types of experiences.The PEA project launches the philosophy of experiential artifacts as a new area of inquiry in which the relationship between art and technology can be properly studied, thereby offering a new conceptual toolbox for historical and empirical research. This will be done through a fourfold methodology in which aesthetics and the philosophy of mind analyze the experiences that experiential artifacts are meant to trigger, while metaphysics and the philosophy of technology investigate the structure in virtue of which they perform this function. PEA will thus reconceptualize artworks as technical artifacts that we value for the way in which they enable us to enrich, share and coordinate our experiences. Website: https://pea.unige.it/(opens in new window)
The main achievements in the first two years are the definition and the taxonomy of experiential artifacts. The notion of experiential artifact is paramount to the PEA project, it is the key to explaining the relationship between art and technology, as well as the role of art in human culture. These achievements are connected to the two first research objectives of the project, namely, to relate technology to experience and to reconceptualize art as a technology of experience. The objective of relating technology to experience has been achieved through the analysis of the notions of artifact and experience. The objective of reconceptualizing art as a technology of experience has been achieved through the application of the notion of experiential artifact to specific forms of art.
The development of the research project so far has made it possible for the first time to address the way in which artifacts elicit experiences from a philosophically interdisciplinary point of view, gathering together scholars with different disciplinary philosophical backgrounds and expertise. PEA has set out for a stimulating research path which so far has been able to illuminate both how technology can generate experiences and to understand how to reconceptualize art as a technology of experience. A particular attention has been devoted to the analysis of the notion of experiential artifacts and on how various artifacts generate peculiar experiences, building in such a way a useful taxonomy. The PEA project innovative methodology involves the systematic interconnection of four fields of contemporary analytic philosophy, namely, aesthetics, philosophy of technology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.